In a new research, UK researchers have been successful in understanding the biological mechanism, which explains the reason for the stabilization of planet's atmosphere and climate over past 24 million years.

About millions of years ago, the levels of carbon dioxide was approximately nil in the Earth’s atmosphere. At that time, forests and trees tightened their belts and slowed down the rate of removal of CO2 from the atmosphere to maintain ecological balance.

Joe Quirk, from the University of Sheffield, said that with the fall of CO2 level in atmosphere, earth can lose its greenhouse effect, leading to glacial conditions. But, nothing has happened in past 24 million years. He said that level of CO2 concentration did not fall from 180 to 200 parts per million.

Researchers cited an example of volcanic eruptions, which releases CO2, but maximum of it gets removed from the atmosphere because of the process of ‘weathering’.

It is breakdown of minerals inside rocks and soils, which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on being contact with carbonic acid i.e. combination of rain and atmospheric CO2.

Moreover, these carbonates are being carried into oceans and rivers forming carbonate rocks like limestone, which holds carbon on the seafloor for millions of years, preventing it from forming CO2 in the atmosphere.

The research, which has been published in Biogeosciences, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU), is titled as ‘Weathering by tree root-associating fungi diminishes under simulated Cenozoic atmospheric CO2 decline’.